Voice recognition technology for converting voices into character strings is known. With this voice recognition technology, voices made by a speaker are first picked up by a sound pickup device. Next, a characteristic pattern of the picked up voices is extracted. A character string pattern corresponding to the extracted characteristic pattern is outputted as a recognition result, whereby the voices are converted to character strings.
Patent Document 1 relates to the combined use of such voice recognition technology with lip recognition technology that recognizes patterns on the basis of characteristic patterns in the shape of the speaker's lips.
[Patent Document 1] Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 6-311220